


nor have we touched the stars

by ygrittebardots



Series: the gathering fire [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Canon, Body Horror, F/M, Family Drama, Gen, Rebellion, Sexual Content, Slavery, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-07
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-03-16 17:17:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3496451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ygrittebardots/pseuds/ygrittebardots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after the fall of the Republic, Anakin is abducted by the Hutts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I have loved the stars too fondly

It’s dark when Padmé wakes up. Very, very dark. And quiet. Oddly quiet, really. Of course there’s the ambient noise of the far-off station engines, but by now the constant background hum is something akin to silence for her. Though her head is thick and heavy with sleep still, she carefully disentangles herself from the mess of limbs and blanket enough to turn over without waking her bedmate.

The chrono on the white, impersonal bedstand reads precisely 0400 hours to the minute.

Padmé groans.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, this wouldn’t have fazed her. Jedi Naberrie was more than used to waking up at all hours of the night. Jedi Naberrie was, more often than not, in fact crawling into her bed about now. Jedi Naberrie had more pressing matters to consider. Peace talks, invasions, assassinations, an all-out kriffing civil war. A dependable sleep schedule was never at the top of her priorities.

But Padmé has not been a Jedi for a very long time. She is a Force-user, always, but in the span of fifteen years she has been a general, a traitor, a rebel, a spy, a wife, a mother. And she takes her sleep very, _very_ seriously.

So yes, Padmé groans, and next to her the young man with a mess of blond hair starts awake.

“Mom!” her fourteen year-old son grumbles into the pillow.

“Sorry, love,” she says sleepily. “Go back to bed.”

And then: “Where’s your sister?”

“Hm?”

“Where’s your sister, Luke?” she repeats, frowning at the vacated spot on her other side where her daughter had fallen asleep mere hours before.

“Dunno…” comes the faint reply, followed by a long, shallow inhale as he falls back to sleep.

Carefully, Padmé extracts herself from the bed. The living area of their assigned quarters - for this month, at least - is just as dark as the bedroom, but she passes through them without concern. Even without the pull of a Force signature to guide her, she’d know precisely the place.

When she ascends the ladder to the lofted storage area, Leia is there, as she knew she would be. Legs folded into her, arms wrapped around them, eyes drinking in the magnificent sight of a Glee Anselm hurricane from space. The large porthole here, by some fluke of design, affords the best view in the station.

“Hi,” she says, pulling herself up into the small space.

Leia doesn’t respond.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she tries again, and wraps an arm around her shoulder.

Leia immediately shrugs it off. “I don’t see how you can,” she says darkly, quietly, still not looking at her. Padmé hears the accusation in her voice and tries not to think of Anakin. She fails.

“Refusing to sleep isn’t going to help your father,” she tells her bluntly. If Leia doesn’t want comfort, soothing words or touch, that’s fine. She won’t give it to her.

“And sitting here on our asses doing nothing will?” she snaps.

“Language, lady.”

“Fark. Skrog. Vape. Krong. Druk. Shavit. Kriff. Schutta.”

“Are you done?”

“E chu ta.”

She waits. Hears her daughter breath in heavily and then out again.

“Feel better?”

“No.”

Leia’s angry. She understands that. She’s angry, too, now that she’s properly awake. It’s an anger that seeps into every fibre of her being, a terrible fury felt so deeply it’s a wonder she’s been able to restrain herself these past days when all she ever seems to want to do is trash every room she walks into. A wonder born of decades of training in meditation and patience, but a wonder nonetheless. The trick is in recognising the anger, and in knowing she has to be strong for her children.

She wants to reach out to her, she does. Enfold Leia’s energy in her own, wrap her up safe and loved and not let go until she’s settled, until she knows she’s safe. Padmé just doesn’t know how much she can trust herself not to let the hate creep in, too.

“We’re going to find him,” she says, and it’s true. She knows it’s true. It always is.

It’s just that that’s not the problem this time, and both of them know it.

“And until then?” Leia asks. “It’s just. It’s Dad.”

“I know. And he’s strong.”

“I can. I can  _feel_  him,” she says, the iron wall of her will and fury beginning to crack. This time she doesn’t flinch when Padmé puts a soothing hand on the back of her neck.

Because she can feel him, too. Even from halfway across the galaxy, she can sense his anger, and his pain, and how much it all _hurts_. She feels the burning firestorm crackling in Anakin's heart as if it were her own, and the lightyears between the two of them seem to go on without end.

“He’ll survive this,” she responds, and presses a kiss to her daughter’s temple. And although revenge is not the way of a Jedi, she walked away from the Order and the Republic long before they were gone, and Padmé now puts her family before all else. “And the Hutts will pay for what they've done. We'll burn them to the ground.”


	2. to be fearful of the night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This became a two-shot because fialleril asked me to write a scene occurring two days after the first.

Anakin lost his arm when he was fourteen.

It was his realisation of what was going to happen, and his vibroblade that sawed through sinew and bone, and his stomach that churned and sizzled hot and raw and acidic while his mother and best friend stroked his hair and held him against their chests until it was done. But more important than all this, it was his decision. Once he’d located his transmitter, embedded in an impossible crevice of bone and tissue, there had been a choice, and he’d made it. For the first time in his life, he had chosen for himself.

He could live without his arm.

He couldn’t live any longer without his freedom.

More than two decades later, the tiny mechanical chip tying him to masters and squalor, denying him the right to his own self, is long gone. The scarred stub ending just above where his elbow once was has long-since healed. But the wrist of his durasteel extension, crossed with his remaining flesh one, hangs in chains all the same.

Half-dead with pain and exhaustion, Anakin feels nothing but hatred for the Hutts, and by extension, Palpatine. Pure, burning hatred. Under his empire, they have been allowed to thrive again, to once more close an iron fist around Tatooine, to again render powerless the people -  _his_  people - who have already fought so fearlessly to throw off their shackles. Capturing him, he who was the People’s Leader, is just gloating, an unnecessary demonstration of power. But he’s certain it’s thrown the Alliance off, and is therefore just as certain that Palpatine’s responsible for setting the Hutts on his trail.

Anakin’s body burns with deep cuts and bruises, and the old familiarity of the aftershock of an electrowhip. If he could muster the energy to lift his head, he could see Jabba himself from the place on the wall where they hung him, like a tapestry or painting, a prized piece of art. He doesn’t want to do it. Every muscle in his neck and the pounding in his head scream in protest, but he forces his head upwards all the same.

No one is looking at him, but a free man does not bow his head to a Hutt.

Blinking through the strands of filthy hair hanging before his eyes, reality swims before him in pieces. Jabba’s grotesque tongue, the murmurs of his assorted guests, the colour of the drinks, two dancing Twi’lek girls. He dimly notes the collars around their necks, the chains leading back to the Hutt, the smaller girl’s breastband that seems on the verge of falling off, and realises with a jolt that she can’t be more than thirteen or fourteen.

Leia is fourteen.

Hot bile rises in his throat.

He’s not naive. He’s never had that luxury, just the same as every Tatooine child whose mother claims her child has no father. He knows that things like age and consent mean nothing when life is there to be exploited and used. But Anakin is not just a fatherless boy anymore. He’s a father himself now, and his daughter and his son were born free, and never before has he been so desperately thankful for that as he is right in this moment.

A burning like white hot fire coursing through him, Anakin’s head clears, and for the briefest of moments, he locks eyes with the revolting slug.

Then he feels it. A nearby presence he’s missed beyond words, a signature in the Force he’d know anywhere. It crashes into him like a wall of durasteel, nudging the Force to swirl and dance impatiently around his bound hands, and in the work of a moment Anakin knows that somewhere, high above him and the Hutts and this cursed palace, Padmé’s come out of hyperspace. She’s found him. She always does.

Teeth still bleeding, eyes trained steadily on Jabba, Anakin grins.


End file.
